Voyage through the universe with APOD

Those pictures of exploding universes and uncharted galaxies first seen though the lens of the Hubble telescope can get addictive. Fortunately for us astro-fans there is a website called APOD that I just learned about from web curator extraordinaire Alex Lightman.

The site pulls together images taken from dozens of the best telescopes in the world and selects a top picture of the day, along with a brief description written in layman's terms.

Above is the beautiful and unusual Sombrero Galaxy, which is described as follows:

Why does the Sombrero Galaxy look like a hat? Reasons include the Sombrero's unusually large and extended central bulge of stars, and dark prominent dust lanes that appear in a disk that we see nearly edge-on. Billions of old stars cause the diffuse glow of the extended central bulge. Close inspection of the bulge in the above photograph shows many points of light that are actually globular clusters. M104's spectacular dust rings harbor many younger and brighter stars, and show intricate details astronomers don't yet fully understand. The very center of the Sombrero glows across the electromagnetic spectrum, and is thought to house a large black hole.

The site was created by two well-known astronomers Robert Nermiroff (MIT) and Jerry Bonnell (NASA) and now, thanks to iTunes, the glory of the universe is available for the iPhone.

The app called APODviewer is $2.99 but will bring you’re the latest pics of the day. It also allows you to save images to your library.

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